Californians are passionate about the term "organic," which is why many of them pay a premium price for foods grown with no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.

Consumers of organic agriculture support a growing $24 billion national industry that has a major presence here in California. But they do so only because they assume that government and growers are watching out for what they buy.

That faith has been badly shaken by revelations reported by The Bee's Jim Downing in a Dec. 28 story. Through open records requests, Downing learned that the state Department of Food and Agriculture had caught a California manufacturer spiking its organic fertilizer with chemicals but didn't act against the company for more than two years.

According to Downing's reporting, agriculture department inspectors learned from a whistleblower in June 2004 that California Liquid Fertilizer, based in Salinas, was adding ammonium sulfate to a fertilizer that was supposed to be made from fish and chicken waste.

At the time, the company was a fast-growing manufacturer of organic fertilizer. Within two years, it would control a third of the state's market, supplying big organic producers such as Earthbound and Tanimura & Antle.

Despite the stakes involved, it took a year for a state inspector to sample and test the company's leading product. Further tests found more ammonium sulfate in the company's fertilizer.

In February 2006, the same state agriculture inspector intercepted two tank cars in Salinas that had manifests showing they had delivered ammonium sulfate to the company's plant.

These findings should have immediately prompted agriculture officials to pull the company's products off the shelves. The Agriculture Department also had sufficient evidence to pass along to the state attorney general, who could have brought a civil case against the company for unfair business practices.

Instead of taking these actions, the Agriculture Department decided to negotiate a settlement with California Liquid Fertilizer. As a result, the company's bogus product wasn't pulled from the shelves until January 2007, and the reasons were kept obscure.

Asked about his department's response on Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura said he was busy in 2006 dealing with the E. coli outbreak traced to Salinas spinach, and wasn't personally involved with the decision not to seek a civil action against California Liquid Fertilizer.

In the last year, he said, his department has beefed up its oversight of the fertilizer industry, partly because the industry agreed to assess itself with higher fees. If growers agree to an increased assessment, the department also hopes to hire more inspectors to check on organic products.

To be sure, the job of policing thousands of organic farms and fertilizer makers can't rest with government alone. The growers and retailers who are capitalizing on the demand for organics must be more active in ensuring the integrity of their products.

But in this case, California's Agriculture Department had a chance to send a strong deterrent message to potential shysters, and it failed to do so.

Because of that failure, this probably won't be the last time that a grower or manufacturer of products labeled as organic tries to take advantage of people's natural inclination to do well by the Earth.